RICERCA ITALIANA     

Tension and change in English domain-specific genres

Università degli Studi di Bergamo

Abstract

Our study will focus on the evolving aspects of English professional and disciplinary discourses. It aims to record the transformations undergone by domain-specific genres, not least in response to the increasing globalisation of communicative practices and the impact of information technology, with special attention for such phenomena as genre creation, migration and hybridisation. Sources of tension within and across texts will be researched by observing the ‘genre sets’ available to a range of communities of practice, to be identified and investigated also with the aid of ethnographic data from specialist informants.

The range and distribution of specific genres within such sets will then be explored by means of corpora representative of documents produced by each parent discourse community. The research units will subsequently identify and evaluate tensions within (established, emerging or declining) genres, in terms of reconfiguration, cross-fertilisation, labelling, communicative purposes, etc., through an approach capable of balancing an in-depth knowledge of the intellectual/interactional process instrumental to the textualisations of a given genre with a microlinguistic analysis of the rhetorical and microlinguistic features encoded in its products.

Finally, the results yielded by such analyses will be used to reconstruct the discoursal links between professional practices in the field, on the one hand, and current generic tensions, on >>>

Principal Investigator

Maurizio Gotti Università degli Studi di BERGAMO

Research Objectives

The main objectives of the project may be summarised as follows:

- To constitute a set of specialised English corpora, representative both of native and non-native speakers engaged in international communication in the domains of science and scholarship, business and economics, politics, European institutions and the law. The investigation will focus on variation in the range and distribution of genres observed within such fields in response to structural, epistemological and semiotic transformations in the communities of practice that ‘own’ them and to new technologies.

- To investigate in such corpora the tensions within established, emerging or declining genres, in terms of textual reconfiguration, cross-fertilisation and labelling but also by looking at the underlying set of communicative purposes that underpin their rationale and rhetoric. This requires an integrated approach capable of connecting to (and accounting for) the intellectual, interpersonal and microlinguistic dimension of specialised communication.

- To study ongoing transformations in the genres represented in the corpus, also drawing on ethnographic evidence from specialist informants, in order to understand what pressures may have originated quantitative/qualitative variations within and across such texts.

- To gain a deeper understanding of the impact of globalisation and new technologies on the genre set available to members of >>>

First Results

Phase 1

Results envisaged in the first phase are as follows:
a. construction and translation of specialised terminologies pertaining to the domains considered;
b. realisation of preliminary studies aimed at identifying the main research areas to be targeted in the next phase and the tools most appropriate for the project’s objectives;
c. a national methodological seminar for the presentation of corpus texts and comparisons of data with other Units;
d. creation of a special website within the existing CERLIS framework (www.unibg.it/cerlis.htm).


Phase 2

Results envisaged in the second phase are as follows:
a. preparation of a CD-ROM containing the compiled corpora organised in a hypertextual format;
b. organisation of a joint methodological seminar involving all the research units for a reconsideration and discussion of final results in hand and of the methodology employed;
c. reports containing the results of the analyses performed.


Phase 3

Results envisaged in the third phase are as follows:
a. an international conference devoted to the Project;
b. articles published in national and international journals;
c. papers in conference/colloquium proceedings;
d. publication of linguistic monographs and edited collections focusing on the themes of the research project, with special reference to the issues of tension >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The process of internationalisation of English offers a topical illustration of the interaction between linguistic and cultural factors in the construction of discourse, both within specialised domains and in wider discourse contexts: discourse analysis is able to highlight the cultural values inherent in a given social grouping, whose textualisations reflect a set of shared interpretations – a “world view” with clear institutional implications. Domain-specific discourses, originating in communities linked to local roots as well as to international conventions, are fertile ground for analysis of variation, both at the textual level and in the development of interpretative schemata that shape the semantic-pragmatic traits of the professional community involved.

This process is most evident in domains of use such as academic, technical, scientific and legal communication, where the socialisation/textualisation of knowledge plays a crucial cohesive role. The investigation of genres in such fields and of their diachronic development is a source of valuable evidence as to the language-culture interface, a relationship addressed by several ethnographic and sociolinguistic studies (Bhatia 1993 and 2004; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995; Bondi 1999; Cortese & Hymes 2001; Swales 1990, 1998, 2004; Gillaerts & Gotti 2005).

Textual tensions arising from globalisation have been analysed primarily in English-medium professional >>>